[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/IMG_8504.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tCarol Bove\u2018s rotunda-filling Guggenheim Museum show in New York may be billed as a retrospective, but it\u2019s not a solo show in the traditional sense: it also features works by a range of artists interspersed throughout. In fact, the crown jewel of the show is not a sculpture by Bove but a mural by Joan Mir\u00f3 that\u2019s always on hand at the Guggenheim\u2014even though the general public typically can\u2019t see it.<\/p>\n
\n\tComposed of 190 ceramic tiles, the work is a 19-foot-long mural titled Alicia<\/em> (1965\u201367) that Mir\u00f3 produced in collaboration with the ceramicist Josep Llorens Artigas. It\u2019s now viewable near the ramp leading up to the second level for the first time in more than 20 years.<\/p>\n \n\tAccording to a text within the show, the mural was commissioned in 1963 by Harry F. Guggenheim, who was at the time the president of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to pay homage to Alicia Patterson, the Newsday<\/em> editor who was married to Guggenheim and died that same year. Most of the time, the mural is hidden behind a false wall.<\/p>\n \n\tWhen seen in full, the mural appears to contain the name \u201cAlice,\u201d and not \u201cAlicia,\u201d with the letters created from Mir\u00f3\u2019s signature black forms. Mir\u00f3 was notified of the odd name choice by the Guggenheim\u2019s director; he declined to alter the work anyway.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s not possible to see all of the mural at the Bove show, since the piece remains mostly trapped behind a grey partition. But Bove provides a partial view of the work through a diamond-shaped aperture that she has carved into the wall.<\/p>\n \n\tThat the mural exists at all is something of an open secret\u2014a part of Guggenheim lore that largely goes unadvertised to the public. When the Guggenheim revealed the mural in its entirety in 2003, as part of a show of works held in the permanent collection, the New York Times<\/em> reported that the museum\u2019s website didn\u2019t even note that the institution owned the work. (This has since changed: the Guggenheim does have a page for Alicia<\/em>, albeit one that is not easily accessible from the hub for its collection.)<\/p>\n \n\tIn her Times<\/em> report, journalist Carol Vogel noted that the mural was \u201ccovered for years because curators thought it interfered with the art on view.\u201d Bove seems to disagree: she includes the mural on the checklist for her show alongside roughly 100 works by herself.<\/p>\n \n\tPlus, as the exhibition\u2019s curator, Katherine Brinson, notes in the catalog, \u201cIn a fortuitous affinity, Mir\u00f3\u2019s emblematic palette of blue, red, yellow, and black aligns with some of the most characteristic colors of Bove\u2019s collage sculptures.\u201d Made of brightly hued rectangles of steel that Bove bends and morphs, those sculptures also appear in the show, which opens to the public tomorrow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/carol-bove-just-revealed-a-miro-mural-typically-hidden-in-the-guggenheims-walls-1234775618\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/IMG_8504.jpg?w=1024″] Carol Bove\u2018s rotunda-filling Guggenheim Museum show in New York may be billed as a retrospective, but it\u2019s not a solo show in the traditional sense: it also features works by a range of artists interspersed throughout. In fact, the crown jewel of the show is not a sculpture by Bove but a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1808732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1808732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1808732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1808732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1808732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}